Quotes About Understanding

But that's what family members are for. We crave them and need them not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about but because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.

I don't think human beings were meant to know so much about the world. All this time and all this exposure to every conceivable aspect of life—wisdom so rarely enters the picture. We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age.

Sometimes I wonder if it is too late to feel the same things that other people seem to be feeling. Sometimes I want to go up to people and say to them, What is it you are feeling that I am not? Please—that's all I want to know.

People need history in order to know themselves

We didn't use food as a reward. As some previous ASL researchers did. Jennie's reward was making herself understood. That is, she was rewarded like a human child would be rewarded. We wanted to replicate the way a human child acquires language. You don't cram food into an infant every time she says something, now, do you? Of course not.

Most detection is simple.

She learned her first two signs five weeks later, on—let's see here—June 4, 1967. They were hug and me. On June 6, she spontaneously signed Hug me Jennie to Mrs. Archibald, her surrogate mother. Mrs. Archibald was under the impression that Jennie's first sign had been directed at her. I didn't correct that misapprehension. Why? I should suppose the reason's obvious.

If this sounds like strange talk from a scientist—so be it. If there is one thing I have learned from a lifetime study of science, it is that the world is not a place we human beings will ever comprehend. Understand, yes; comprehend, no.

our brains did not evolve to help us comprehend the true meaning of things, only to understand their mechanical workings. Knowing the true meaning of reality does not contribute to one's ability to survive, and thus this kind of understanding was not addressed by evolution.

The monkey, as I understood it, is to stay indefinitely. I returned hatless. R. was much put out. I pray God bring her peace.

To most people, Metcalf had discovered, silence was even more unbearable than pointed questioning.

sometimes she didn't know her own strength, and she didn't understand that people were a lot more fragile than she was. Sometimes she was rougher than she intended, you see. Did you know that a full-grown female chimpanzee is three to five times stronger than a man?

Anyway, these conclusions came from people who had never spent any time with chimpanzees. You can't tell anything from a two-hour videotape. I spent five years with five chimpanzees. There are so many modes of communication between human and chimp that can't be quantified. Body language. Vehemence and speed of gesture, facial expression. You had to be there with Jennie to understand the depth of communication. With our enemies out there, and a Senator against us, we got hammered.

That's what humans do. We label, categorize, measure, and dissect because it gives us the illusion of control.

Most people, in my experience, are a little thick. If not abundantly so.

He carried the Lakota principle that he would render no judgments on anyone except through direct experience

You could tell a lot about a person by meeting his brother.

Jennie understands love. Yes, murmured Mrs. Archibald, she knows what love is. I said: then she can understand religion, because religion starts with love. Religion is love. Without first loving God and feeling God's love for us, there can be no religion.

You see, what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our questioning. And what we are, of course, is a response to what we observe.

All living things must pay dearly for the miracle of their existence. We human beings must pay the highest price of all, because evolution has given us a brain capable of understanding death. And death lies across all our lives like some hideous, vulgar joke.

Clara, I feel so full of work, the life I see ahead, and love for you, who of all people however badly I say this will hear all I say and cannot say.

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language guessing at some words while others keep you reading and I want to know which words they are.

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is. End of story.